How To Find Out If Something Is A Scam

Is it a real deal?

I was recently made redundant and decided that between job interviews etc, I would see what money I could earn via the Internet, rather than just sleeping in or going fishing.

Well I was instantly blown away but the 40 million money making opportunities you’ll find without too much trouble via just a couple of simple google searches. And once you sign up for one newsletter or opportunity, you suddenly find yourself being offered another zillion more chances to “work from home and never work again’.

So what have I gone with?

The end result of 4 weeks of “Opportunity Overload’ is that I have joined up with 4 quite different programs with the strategy that they can each complement and network with each other to build a collective income.

First I teamed up with someone else and setup a business membership site at www.ondemandmentoring.com to help other businesses grow.

I then joined two (paying) social networks – zenzuu and 6dgr to promote the above site and build backlinks to it for the search engines. Finally I have invested in one investment type program at myturn4bux to grow my earnngs from the other sites.

In amongst all this I have ‘closed the window’ on uncountable offers that one simply doen’t have the time to explore or consider.

So how did I decide which ones were worth pursuing and which ones were best left alone? (or avoided like the plague in some cases).

For me anyway, some of the things I considered when evaluating an offer or opportunity were:

How long had they been around and how big were they?

Did anyone I know, know anything about it/them?

What info could I find about them on the net?

Were they mentioned on any of the scam reporting sites?

Was the method of earning money ethical, fair and legal?

How much time on a daily basis was required to make it profitable?

How easy was it to get my money/earnings out?

Was I going to be making $5 a day, $50 or $500?

What do forums say about the opportunity.

How much did it cost to get started?

Number 9 is an easy one to do and an example of that is that I did a search on myturn4bux.com on forums and scam sites seeing as their program sounded so good. It didn’t get any mentions at scam reporting sites and only one negative comment amongst hundreds at various forums. (So I signed up and it’s been Great with them fulfilling their promises without question!)

Many other such sites/offers sounded really good at first too, but on doing the DD and asking around, I’d find out that you’d only earn 5-$10 an hour(at best) and often by doing things like reading ads or filling out surveys that would bore you to tears. I am definitely not the ‘sit at my computer all day clicking a mouse’ kind of guy.

As for the ‘scam’ side of things where you’d give some money and never see your product or membership opened or anything, I’d have to say that I didn’t actually come across many. Sites like The Rifpoff Report and Scam.com are good starting places to check things out.

There are certainly lots of opprotunities that will be a waste of time with regards how much you can earn for the time you put in, but as for classic rip off’s and theiving scams, they seem fairly few and far between – fortunately.

In summary, if you’re looking for money making opprotunities or offered one in some form, run through the 10 points I mentioned above and realise that most schemes can actually generate money, it’s just finding the better ones that will give a realistic return on your efforts.